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Minority governments are more common in Denmark than in any other parliamentary democracy. Internationally, the literature associates minority governments with short-lived, inefficient governments. Yet this is not the case in Denmark. Here, successive governments have served full terms in recent decades and managed to pass large numbers of substantive reforms. This chapter considers how Danish minority governments manage to cope so well and whether polarisation and populism may challenge the solutions to this apparent paradox. The legislative bargaining and agreements (politiske forlig) between government and opposition parties are highly institutionalised, giving opposition parties policy influence and procedural privileges almost akin to cabinet parties – but only on the items on which agreement has been reached. The government is therefore able to maintain flexibility. Danish governments have also increased their hierarchical coordination, both in the form of policy through coalition agreements and internally in the form of cabinet committees and a strengthened Prime Minister's Office. The argument here is that these changes make it easier for a government to negotiate as a coherent unit, and the fact that the parties on the respective ideological wings of the Folketing are also included in negotiations and agreements means that polarisation does not seem to affect minority government performance.

In this concluding chapter, the editors provide an overall assessment of contemporary Danish public governance based on the main findings in the preceding chapters of the edited volume. Surveying the Danish governance responses to contemporary mega-challenges, the chapter reflects on policy implications and contemplate the future of both research and practice related to public administration, politics and governance in Denmark. The chapter argues that recent public governance reforms have turned the Danish welfare state into a mix of a neo-Weberian state and an enabling state, which deploys its considerable resources to create economic growth for the benefit of the large majority of Danes, to satisfy the needs of citizens and businesses and to develop collaborative solutions to complex problems. While the chapter concludes that this modified version of the well-known universal welfare state is largely apt for meeting the mega-challenges of the twenty-first century, recent reforms seeking to enhance job-seeking incentives for the unemployed and to integrate immigrants have resulted in new forms of marginalisation of weaker societal groups. Moreover, evolving problems such as climate change, an ageing population and digital citizen privacy will require further public governance reforms in the years to come.

In the twenty-first century, societies around the world are facing a wide range of daunting global mega-challenges: poverty, unemployment, income inequality, unequal distribution of political power, ageing populations, uncontrolled migration, segregated urbanisation, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and a massive decrease in biodiversity. In recent years, politicians, journalists and academic observers have singled out the Nordic countries, Denmark in particular, as model societies of trusting and happy people that have handled many of these challenges with remarkable effectiveness. And yet others warn against ‘becoming Denmark,’ painting a picture of a dysfunctional, socialist nightmare with high taxes, low job motivation and a general lack of private initiative. In this introductory chapter, the editors cut through the noise of the international debate and set the scene for the nuanced analyses presented here of contemporary public governance in Demark and its capacity to tackle some of the most pressing problems of our time. Specifically, the chapter discusses various conceptualisations of the Danish welfare state, delineates some of its most important historical and structural traits and outlines the main empirical features of contemporary Danish public governance. Finally, it outlines the structure of the book and briefly introduces each of its subsequent chapters.